Surbhi Malhotra-Kumar holds Master degrees in Medical Microbiology (1998, MS University, Baroda, India), and in Molecular Biology & Biotechnology (2003, Free University of Brussels), and a Phd in Medical Sciences (2005, UAntwerpen). She held FWO postdoctoral scholarships (2007-2010, 2010-2012 scholarship was surrendered due to ZAP appointment) and is currently Associate Professor (ZAP-BOF) in Medical Microbiology (since October 2011). She has received several awards including the Young Investigator Award from the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID, 2011), and the Eugène Yourassowsky Award in Microbiology and Infectious diseases, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (2006). She has been program committee member (2014-2016) of the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), was designated ESCMID fellow (FESCMID) based on scientific excellence in 2016, was appointed chair of the ESCMID study group on antimicrobial resistance surveillance (ESGARS) in 2018, and was appointed member of the Microbiology and Immunology expert panel (Med3) by the Research Foundation-Flanders (2019-2021) . She has published more than 90 articles (ISI WoS citations: 1907, h-index: 23, m-index: 1.46; Google Scholar citations: 3430, h-index: 29, m-index: 1.90), and of her 29 most highly cited papers, >50% are as last or first author. She is regularly invited to give talks at international meetings and scientific symposia, and as an expert to review European, Swiss, Portuguese, and French national research grants, and for on-site research group evaluations. She is co-organizer of the One health Congress held in Saskatoon, Canada in 2018, and of several workshops on antimicrobial resistance and whole genome sequencing as ESGARS chair, and on biofilms as part of an FWO-WOG project.
Malhotra-Kumar has attracted funding of over 10 million Euros as part of EU projects and through national (FWO, IWT) as well as industrial funding. She has lead and is leading workpackages on molecular and clinical microbiology and diagnostics in IMI projects such as COMBACTE-MAGNET and Value-Dx (recently granted), H2020 (COMPARE), JPIAMR (STARCS), and EU-FP6/FP7 (MOSAR, IntopSENS, TheraEDGE, SATURN, R-GNOSIS).